Authors: Gael Baudino
His lie an ache of nausea in his heart, Siegfried found himself looking at the book in the trash bin. Gingerly, he picked it up, leafed through it once again. Waldensians. Beghards. It was all clear.
But, no: it was not clear. Siegfried was the Inquisitor of Furze, and he should certainly know whether an individual's heresy was clear or not. And so, in this case, he had determined that it was not.
On his way out of the office, he tossed the book into the fire.
People who visited the Chapel of Our Lady of the Angels a short time later were a little disconcerted to find Siegfried of Madgeburg prostrate before the altar, his forehead pressed to the cold stone floor, his clenched hands extended toward the tabernacle. The people came and went, but Siegfried stayed throughout the morning. It was a disturbing sight, to be sure, but perhaps not a surprising one: Siegfried was known to be a holy man. Why, according to some he had never told a lie in his life!
***
Was anything, Jacob wondered, ever as he expected it? Was the past at all as he remembered it? He had grown used to the suspicion that his memories of the virtue and purpose of the past were fantasies, delusions, the grapplings of an old man with the futility of goodness; and, as though he were donning a kind of spiritual armor both against the world and his own more tender yearnings, he had responded to that suspicion with growing cynicism and cruelty. But beneath the armor, he had still (he realized now) harbored a small, vibrant hope that his memories were not all delusions, that his fantasies held a small germ of truth.
Marjorie, perhaps, had been that hope, that small flicker of spiritual optimism that had guarded him from abject despair. He himself had grown evil, had, seemingly, taken delight in deliberately smearing himself with the dross and corruption of his time. Marjorie, though—the Marjorie he remembered—had been good, pure, an angel of love and delight that he had driven out of his house; and he had carried the memory of her within him like a talisman.
But here was Marjorie now, come back after three decades of wandering with the gypsies. And here was Jacob's last delusion, his last hope, his last memory . . . exploded.
“How much money do you have now, Jacob?” Propped up on feather pillows, wrapped up in linen sheets and swaddled in comforters, Marjorie peered out from beneath a cap of gray hair, her blue eyes as crafty as Jacob's, her brow set and intent. “Are you going to give me any
now
?”
Jacob sat at her bedside, old hands clasped on old knees, feeling the emptiness that came with desolation. He had thought that the little whore had finished him. But he had gone on: out into the streets, down the alleyways, straight into the arms of this woman.
He could not deny her: she was his wife. He knew it. She knew it. But neither could he deny that she was a living refutation of everything that had kept him sane and alive.
“All . . . all that you want,” he said, still longing after the fading form of a banished angel.
Marjorie spat: blood and pus. “I don't want anything that's not mine. And your money isn't mine. You keep it to yourself, don't you? You don't give any of it away, do you?”
Jacob stared blankly. Eudes, dusty and dry, stood by the door, ready to depart on any errand that might be assigned to an old wardrobe and obviously wishing that one might come soon.
“I've given some away,” said Jacob slowly, wishing that his voice did not sound so tentative. In his more grandiose moods, he had thought of himself as a viper that, like the serpent depicted on that old Visconti crest, devoured its enemies. But this viper was, apparently, a seedy old worm, without teeth, without venom. Useless. One might skin it, perhaps, and make a belt out of it, but that was all.
Marjorie laughed. “Oh, you've given some away, have you? Sure you have.”
“Madam . . .” began Eudes tentatively. “Mister Jacob is—”
“Thank you, Eudes,” Jacob interrupted quietly. “I don't need you to defend me.”
The old wardrobe nodded stiffly.
“You may go.”
Eudes bowed amid a creaking of rusty hinges. He withdrew, shut the door.
Marjorie spat again. “You're like the gypsies, Jacob. You give a little, and then you take everything. Everyone's a
gadja
to you. Even your family. Even your wife.”
There was a cramping in Jacob's heart, and he wished that the little whore had killed him. He no longer questioned her appearance in his bedroom, no longer even speculated about who might introduced her into the house. He did not care. He simply wished that he had died between her legs with a stiff prick and a smile on his face.
But he had lived—had not even had a good orgasm for his trouble—and he had found Marjorie. And now it was all tumbling down into a heap: all his dreams, all his illusions, all his fantasies. His armor, cracked, exposed him as a simpleton of an old man, a crab without a shell, ready to be gutted and eaten.
“Everyone . . .” he mumbled.
Marjorie nodded with a jerk that set her to coughing. A trail of slime and blood had found its way out of the corner of her mouth by the time she was done, and, with a harsh crow, she swabbed it off with a handful of sheet. “I'm gone,” she said. “I heard your doctor talking to you. He won't give me more than a week. But I don't care. I'm here, and you'll feed me and take care of me, and I'll go comfortable. That's why I came back: to get something out of you for a change.”
Jacob nodded.
That's why I came back.
Money. That was it. And if Francis and Edvard and Norman had gotten greed and avarice from Jacob, a strain of contempt for anything that could not be plunked down on a table in gold and silver, then from Marjorie they had inherited a crassness that had confirmed them in their single-minded, covetous, exploitative pursuits.
Marjorie had turned to the tray of food that lay on the bed table. She crammed a mouthful of cake between her toothless jaws and washed it down—along with the blood and slime that she had coughed up—with a full cup of wine.
“Why . . .” Jacob stared at the empty cup she left.
She threw it to the floor. It bounced away, clattered against the far wall. “Why what?”
“Why did you go?”
“Because you were a mouse, Jacob.”
A soft tap on the door. Jacob recognized the knock. “Come in, Natil.”
The harper entered. Her dark hair, with the exception of the single small b raid that held the defiant eagle feather, fell unconfined and uncovered to her waist, and her slender arm cradled her harp as though it was an infant. “Master, I have come to offer my music.”
Jacob nodded. “Thank you, Natil. I think some music would be—”
He turned back to Marjorie, and his words were choked off by the look of fear on the old hag's face. But Marjorie was not looking at him: she was staring instead at Natil, who had approached the bed.
Natil?
“. . . uh . . . good for us both,” he finished lamely.
Marjorie was muttering something under her breath. It sounded like a prayer, or a charm.
Natil nodded serenely. “Madam,” she said to Marjorie, “I have heard that you are ill.”
“I'm . . .” Marjorie fought with her emotions, dredged up words. “I'm dead.”
“You are ill,” said Natil. There was compassion in her voice, but it was not the compassion that came of the human fear of dying, that expressed itself in false sentiments and the fakery of brave words. No, Natil was compassionate because Marjorie was dying, because it was important for people to be compassionate. “And so I have come to play for you. Music can sometimes heal. At the very least, music can soothe.”
“I . . .” Marjorie was still staring at Natil, and Jacob fully expected her to curse the harper and send her back out into the hall. But to his surprise, she seemed to wilt into herself, and she nodded meekly. “Yes. Yes, I'd like that. Play.”
Natil settled herself on a stool in the corner. Her hands moved to the strings of her instrument, and a soft chord rang out. A melody followed: stark, unadorned, but comforting.
Marjorie looked as though she were a rat that had found itself in the presence of a snake. “Who's that?” she hissed.
“Natil,” said Jacob. “She's one of the house musicians.”
Her eyes crinkled up into a semblance of mirth. “And you just found her out in the square, did you?”
“Actually, Josef found her.”
She laughed without any feeling. “Josef. That nitwit. Didn't know anything, doesn't know anything.”
Hearing his own sentiments from his wife's mouth, Jacob rose to his son's defense. “You don't know that. He was a baby when you . . . when you left. Actually, he's a fine musician. And a scholar.”
“He's a nitwit.” Marjorie snorted, dribbling blood from her lips. Natil's music floated through the room. “I could tell. That first day I held him in my arms, he looked up at me with those stupid eyes, and I knew.”
Jacob was afraid to ask her opinion of Francis and Karl. “And so you left.”
“You were a mouse, Jacob. But you were a greedy mouse. You . . .” Marjorie stole an almost fearful look at Natil, but the harper was lost in her music. “. . . you got in my way. Always. Told me what to do. Didn't give me a moment's peace. Tried to fuck me every chance you got. I got sick of you and your orders and your tantrums. And I got sick of those mewling little kids you forced on me. So I ran away. I figured that nothing was better than something with you around.”
The cramp in Jacob's heart tightened. Yes, yes: she was right. Had he not prided himself on his greed? “And you . . . you came back to die,” he said hollowly. There seemed to be nothing about him that was not hollow.
“I figured that I ought to get something out of you.” With a quick glance at the harper, she grabbed his sleeve. “You
owe
it to me.
You owe it!
”
Jacob stared into eyes that mirrored his. Fear. Disappointment. A desire for material objects that bordered on lust. Oh, it was all there, and when Francis came to the door a few minutes later, sanctimoniously and publicly performing what he perceived as his filial obligation to call upon his beloved mother, Jacob saw the same thing in his eyes, too.
He found that he hated Francis. He found that he hated them all. He found that he hated himself. The house was a sepulcher, the motto
In the name of God and profit
a hideous jest and epitaph both, as though one might bite one's thumb in the face of the advancing skeletal presence of Death itself.
Money. It was all money. Even Marjorie had grounded her departure and her return on money.
Jacob felt an unclenching in his belly, a sense of release. But it was not the release of fulfillment. Rather, it was a crumbling, a destruction, the same yielding up of stress and tension that came of a bridge or a castle falling into ruin. Perhaps, he thought, trees would take root in what was left of his heart. Maybe birds would come and nest in his hair.
That evening, he sat by what he knew would be his wife's deathbed. And, in many ways, his own.
***
A week went by. Two weeks. June arrived, the weather turned hot, summery . . . and Marjorie did not die.
But as Jacob, in self-inflicted penance, revolved about the continually decaying physical presence of his wife, so, increasingly, did everyone else. As though the servants were infected with his blundering preoccupation and obsessive involution, they began to wander through a semblance of their duties that had only the vaguest effectiveness. Meals were served sporadically, breakfast, perhaps, showing up on the table at midday, and dinner after everyone retired—to be eaten cold and without appetite in the morning. Cleaning duties were neglected, inventories (even when conducted by the indefatigable Claire) hasty and incomplete. The house, embodied in its duties and routines, fragmented, as though, turning in upon itself, it was unable to cope with what it saw in its own dark heart.
Alone, Omelda labored in the kitchen, washing the floor, scrubbing the pots, scraping grease off the woodwork. She was not ordered to do any of this; rather, she simply acted with the same plodding, ox-like docility that had colored her entire life, that had come to dominate her personality as a result of mounting abuse. For though the household as a whole had become disordered and forgetful, Edvard and Norman continued to be attentive to her. They had lost their plaything, Dinah—and who knew where she was now?—and deprived therefore of the pleasure of costume and theater involving the two women, they fell back upon simple sex, degradation, and torture.
She saw little of Natil, but that was to be expected: the harper was busy with Marjorie, and Omelda had herself absolved her from any further obligation to her former charge. No, Omelda would not, did not sing. No, the voices did not bother her. No, she did not need anything, thank you.
I'll be all right. Don't worry about me.
And so, mornings, hardly able to walk, Omelda limped about in the confines of her room, lurching from bed to table to chair, forcing her recalcitrant feet and legs to move and bend until they were at last obedient enough to carry her out the door and down the hall to the kitchen, where she would spend the day scrubbing and scraping, the plainchant alternately abusing her and dropping her as regularly as did Edvard and Norman. Occasionally, Eudes would come out of his somnambulistic bewilderment long enough to send her on an errand, and occasionally she would find her way to and from her destination without mishap. More often, though, she wandered, lost, for, having folded in upon itself spiritually, the labyrinthine house seemed to have become even more physically convoluted than before.
She was lost one afternoon when she blundered into an unused room to find Josef Aldernacht sitting at a table, an idle lute in his lap. Paper and pens and ink were laid out before him, but they were dusty, as though they had been untouched for days, perhaps weeks. Sunlight streamed down on him through a tall window that was opalescent with dust and neglect.
He looked up, startled, rose hastily. “My lady.”
Omelda wavered, half expecting him to remove her gown and put her on the floor. Or tie her up. Or . . .